Over the last decade, the workplace has seen enormous changes, ranging from the rise of distributed teams, to artificial intelligence, to the growth of massive technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.
Every industry is experiencing rapid change as companies try to modernize how they do business. The organizations that fail to make this transition will not exist in the future.
As technology drives this change, more and more jobs become "knowledge work", requiring frequent collaboration between individuals inside a team or across teams. This happens over email, in meetings, or workplace chat software like Slack.
Teams have tried to navigate this change by creating frameworks like Agile to improve productivity and keep everyone in the loop. They've also adopted software like Jira, Asana, or Slack to collaborate and gain a better understanding of what's going on.
According to research, 35% of a middle-manager's week is spent in meetings. For upper-management, that number grows to 50%. According to Asana, 39% of people's time is spent doing work, while 61% of their time is spent on work about work.
Why do we spend more time talking about work and less time actually doing the work?
The reality is that we are still trying to figure out how to navigate this fundamental change to how work gets done.
Employees frequently feel disconnected from the work and workplace, while leaders struggle to fully understand the impact of their decisions. Meanwhile, productivity suffers.
"The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers" - Peter Drucker
We get it, a workplace needs meetings and collaboration to function properly. But faster and more dynamic communications shouldn't require everyone to be talking all the time.
And face-to-face meetings are invaluable as a regular part of creating great work together as a team. But management-by-meeting shouldn't be the primary way we stay in sync, and no one needs to sit in a room for an hour just to hear status updates from the team.
We're not saying you should stop having these meetings, but instead, you should make them more efficient.
What if there was a simple way to keep everyone in the loop that reduced the amount of time you spent in meetings? And made it easier for team leaders to listen and learn what was going on? And for everyone to celebrate success and talk honestly about challenges? And brought some focus and clarity to the noise of the modern workplace?
Fortunately, this is possible with Friday Feedback.
See how Friday Feedback can help your team stay aligned and in the loop.